In this episode, I explain Drop Shipping Basics using AliExpress, Shopify and Oberlo. As you recall, I have been working on a drop shipping eCommerce business for a few month now, and have had some success. Because of that work, I have been getting lots of questions about drop shipping, and so I decided to explain the basics in this episode.

Drop Shipping Basics Show Notes

If you were to open a drop shipping store today, what are the things that you should do? For today’s show, let will break this down and we will talk about how eCommerce works in general, how drop shipping works specifically and how you can start with a very low budget.

Free Drop Shipping Webinar

The idea behind drop shipping is that you do marketing for a product that you do not yet physically possess and then actually sell it. It is about finding a whole seller who makes the product and sells it to you at a cheaper price and then actually ships it directly to your customer. This is appealing because whoever is doing the drop shipping ends up being responsible for production, warehouse, handling and fulfillment. To get the margins that you need, sometimes you will get the products from China and one of the challenges that you might run into would be product quality and shipping time.

A lot of people had benefitted from the ecommerce model where you buy things and store them in your bedroom but the challenge in this model is the fact that will have to worry about being stuck with a bulk of times. If you decide to go with drop shipping, you will not be stuck with a whole bedroom full of product – you just got to find a supplier and they will do the shipping and fulfillment for you. If in case the product you choose really took off, you can work out a deal with your supplier and with the track record that you have already established, you can opt to go back to the previous model for a better profit margin.

If you are to start a Drop Shipping Store, what would you do?

There are only a few steps and they are very low risk:

1. Pick a niche of products that you want to sell. If you already have an established website dealing with a certain niche, you can use that existing platform. If you do not, start imagining a niche where people are making impulse buys in a relatively frequent basis and you can observe this behavior in Facebook.

2. Look around the amazing products at AliExpress. This is the Amazon of China and it is not strictly a drop shipping shop. There are all kinds of stuff here in ridiculously low prices and the more novel an item is, the more successful you will be in selling it. The right price for something is what people will pay. Once you find your products, check out what shipping is available from China. There is this thing called ePacket which is this agreement between the Hong Kong and the US Post Offices where you can ship something out of China and get a valid US tracking number. With this, you can ship something out of China and get a USPS tracking number which you can give to your customer for them to track their shipment online. The shipping time is still slow but it is still better that the traditional shipping methods from China and it’s trackable. For impulse buys, in general, people tolerate the long wait as they do not really need them.

3. Strategize on how to sell your product. If you have an existing website, you can add Woo Commerce in your WordPress plug ins. It is a great, low cost solution to get ecommerce up and running in your website. Now, if you do not have a website, sign up for a free trial in Shopify. It is equivalent to a WrodPress.com where Shopify is hosting your website and maintaining the code only it is tailored for eCommerce – it is really for online stores. Create a Shopify account, connect it to your domain, hook it to your Shopify store and you will be up and running in a few hours. They have everything you need to start your online business including payment processors. If your business progresses in the future and you need to handle bulk shipments, check out Oberlo as it helps you automate functions helpful for more advanced orders.

4. Get the traffic. Advertise through Facebook as the targeting that you can get in Facebook is unparalleled in any other platforms. Drop Shipping turns into a game where you, the player, will identify the narrowly-targeted audience that buys your product at a rate which pays for the ads. Other possible sources of traffic such as SEO, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, etc.

Some items mentioned in the show:

Late Night IM Coffee Mug

Diamond-studded cat collars

Cheap Black Tactical LED Flashlight

Air Sofa

Fidget Spinners on AliExpress:

Links Mentioned In This Episode On Drop Shipping Basics

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Drop Shipping Basics Episode Transcript

This week I’m coming to you in the early morning. How crazy is that for Late Night Internet Marketing? As you know, sometimes my schedule gets so crazy that I actually record the show in the wee hours of the morning instead of late-late at night.

Last night I had no voice. It was time to record the show and I was coming home from the quarter final round in my son’s baseball tournament, I was coaching since the head coach was out of town, and my voice was completely shot.

In fact, you can probably still hear it in my voice. But, we probably sound a lot better than we did last week. Thank you for putting up with that mobile recording last week. I’m going to work on that technology a little bit. That audio quality we had last week was not up to the standards for this show, but it was kind of fun to do that. We’ll work on that and see if we can do a mobile recording now and again. I think that’s kind of fun, so we’ll try that if we can get the quality a little higher than what we had last week.
(Episode 143 Transcript Continued…)